Network Science

Science is always in search of the fundamental truths that can explain the different phenomena that form our universe. This search for the fundamental base truths is no more emphasized than in the field of Mathematics and Physics, where mathematicians and physicists are on a path to quantify, explain, and analyze the rules that guide the universe. As a species, humans are quite arrogant when it comes to our own knowledge and capabilities as we’ve been the “dominant” intellectual species for a very long time.

Events are never isolated Our environment and how we interact with it helps shape its immediate future. This includes the human interaction each person nurtures with other people throughout a lifetime. Existing physical, economic, social, and emotional conditions that an individual is subjected to early in life are usually the basis for his or her thought processes and mechanisms to cope and react to various stimuli. By further exposing oneself to other individuals outside the usual circles, and by keeping a receptive mindset, can we expect to validate or discard ideas that eventually become part of the values system.

If someone is familiar with Clifton Strengths finder, then they have probably heard of the strength Connectedness. From what I can remember, the point is that every event is about a previous event. People with this strength can, therefore, leverage it by bringing people together or seeing the continuity of their strategy down the line. I will admit that I didn’t want to merit it. Sometimes, things just happen randomly. However, what if it isn’t?

If I could put the things that I have realized after watching the documentary in one phrase, I would say – it’s amazing how the world is much smaller than we think. For so long, we humans think that we are individuals with the capacity and ability to think on our own. While this may be true, this notion led us to look more inwards rather than outwards. With the concept of individualism heavily buried in our minds, many communities see themselves as detached from the outside world.

It is astonishing how the existence of networks could be so prevalent, and yet so obscure from people’s awareness for such a long time. Indeed, perhaps we live in a great time as the explosion of data and computational power paved way for a deeper look into the connectedness of things and how such networks could allow us to make sense of how the world works. I think the time is ripe for network science to be fleshed out and mature, given how the connections brought about by rapid travel and communications extremely shrunk the world in the 21st century.

Our perception of the world is limited by our current understanding, i.e. the models and theories that explain and describe the fundamental behaviors and characteristics. With every new model or theory, we step outside of this worldview, capturing a bigger perspective from our original ones. In network theory, one of the famous models before Strogatz and Barabasi’s is the random graphs by Erdos and Renyi in 1959. It posits that in a system, the nature of the interaction of two parts in the system is random.